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I'm running Lion and since the past 2 weeks I've been having really really slow browsing speeds, but extremely fast download speeds (file downloads, torrents, YouTube and Hulu streaming, etc) but page loads are extremely slow. It's only on my laptop and not any other devices in my house, and I'm running it wireless. I've cleared my cache on all three of the browsers I have installed (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). My main browser is Chrome. Sometimes pages don't even load in Chrome or Safari, but then they load in Firefox. Some times when it wants to, it loads pages fast, but that's about 1 in a 1000 pages.

Any ideas what could be causing something like this?

And in case it's of any use, I'm running on a Macbook Pro i7 Quadcore 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

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1 Answer

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It could be that there's a DNS problem somewhere. Web browsing tends to involve a lot of small connections, with several DNS lookups just for one page, whereas large file downloads only need to make one lookup. So if there's an issue with your ISP's DNS servers, it could be slowing down your web browsing without affecting your large transfer speeds.

Try switching your DNS to use the Google Public DNS servers. Open up the Network pane in System Preferences, select your wifi and click Advanced…. Then go to the DNS tab, and enter in 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, as shown in the screencap: network DNS setup Make sure those entries are above anything else in there.

It may be another issue, but this is a good starting point.

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And what about that last line you got there? My router log in is 192.168.0.1, should I put that too? – maq Oct 4 '11 at 16:21
It's weird-I did just what you said, applied it, restarted my computer, and launched up chrome. For the first minute, everything was BLAZING fast. Then now its slow again :( – maq Oct 4 '11 at 16:23
Don't add the 192.168.1.1, that's just what I had in there already. I'd try it without your router DNS to start with. Not sure what would account for the speed-up and slow down. You should add that info to the original question though. – robmathers Oct 4 '11 at 16:26
Ya I didn't add my router – maq Oct 4 '11 at 16:28

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